Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The plight of monarch butterflies has long been documented. Unfortunately, the news isn’t getting better, but there are slivers of hope, thanks to the butterflies themselves.

The number of monarch butterflies spending the winter in the western United States has dropped to its second-lowest mark in nearly three decades as pesticides, diminishing habitat and climate change take their toll on the important pollinator, according to a survey of monarchs that began in 1997.

The survey noted that a site owned by The Nature Conservancy in Santa Barbara that saw 33,200 monarchs last winter hosted only 198 butterflies this year.

Monarchs are found across North America and winter in parts of the United States, often along the California coast, as well as in Mexico.

While there have always been significant spikes and declines over the decades, the decline in numbers has been steady for the past three decades.

Climate change has been a major factor in declining monarch numbers. Monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed plants and floods, droughts and other extreme weather have destroyed the monarchs’ breeding grounds.

More use of pesticides in agriculture has further eliminated milkweed. And deforestation and development south of our border has reduced wintering habitat for monarchs.
Among the bad news is some good news.

Scientists at the Department of Natural Resources in South Carolina have identified a unique group of monarchs that live year-round in the state’s swamps and Sea Islands.

These butterflies, like the ones in Texas, rely on native species of milkweed plants, but they don’t leave the area over winter.

Many scientists believe the monarchs are adapting to the changing environment to survive.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced in December 2024 that it was working to list monarchs as threatened. The agency had in 2020 found its research should prompt the monarch to be listed as endangered.

But the then Trump administration blocked the move. It’s hard to believe Trump’s current administration will allow any protection for the monarchs, or most any other threatened or endangered species.

So the best hope is to get through the next few years and wait for a leader who will not always put profits for corporations ahead of nature.

It’s good to know that animals and plants have an ability to adapt and change. But humans have a responsibility to care for the Earth in the best ways we can to protect the environment, the climate and nature.

We can’t allow human damage to become too much for anything in nature, or we humans, to overcome.

— The Free Press of Mankato, Feb. 11